The Spice Girls burst onto the British music scene in 1996, earning both the adoration and derision that accompany nearly instant fame. From the start, they’ve been almost universally derided in the music industry as a synthetic, mass-marketing tool. Unlike the “Fab Four” Beatles, who had spent years songwriting and playing in clubs before they were discovered, the Spice Girls were essentially manufactured, and thus dubbed by critics as the “Pre-fab Five”.